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During the past year we have been enduring and surviving a worldwide economic meltdown. This meltdown has been unlike any that has been seen since the Great Depression. It has also been a meltdown from which law firms did not escape. For law firms, this has caused more than mere "belt-tightening." Law firms have faced closure and mass layoffs, including layoffs of both law firm staff and attorneys. The economy has forced law firm clients to revisit billing structures and demand discounts for services that were often provided by junior attorneys. Clients have advised that they will no longer underwrite or pay for junior associate training. This client repositioning has led to law firms "deleveraging" new attorney associate hires by withdrawal of offers, deferrals, smaller summer law firm classes, and fewer initial offers of employment. The current class of law students has found itself saddled with substantial debt and with few or limited prospects of employment. Many of these students have responded with anger and frustration toward their law schools. This anger is often based on their perception of not being adequately trained or prepared to quickly practice law and an inability to reinvent themselves. Based on history, the economy will recover and new opportunities will emerge. Since it is unlikely that law student employers and their clients will return to the old "business as usual" associate hiring model, will legal education reinvent itself with a new educational paradigm?
Whether law firms and their clients return to their previous associate hiring model or not, law student anger and frustration at a perceived failure of their legal education has established an "apocalypse kNOW"—an apocalypse of knowledge that has created a new opportunity for legal education and professional training. The new legal associate hiring business paradigm has created for legal education an opportunity to reevaluate and retool its curriculum and educational methodology. This curriculum and methodology have long been criticized as being too theoretical and not rooted in practice. Unlike earlier critiques, however, the current push for legal education reform is marketplace driven. The current associate hiring market is forcing legal education to reevaluate its educational model and discuss or develop a practice-oriented, educational team approach, which will train a new generation of self-sufficient, flexible, tech-savvy, networked attorney lifelong learners. This will result in a team that integrates traditional legal scholarship methodologies with technology in a functional, practice/process-oriented collaborative network.
Traditional legal education and scholarship have long been rooted in the "casebook method" developed by Dean Christopher Langdell of Harvard Law School at the beginning of the last century. The casebook method has been an extremely important and useful educational tool. It is a tool that has successfully taught generations of law students professional legal analytical skills and how to "think like a lawyer." It is taught by superior, dedicated faculty scholar/educators, who often combine the appellate cases as reviewed in casebooks with the "Socratic method." This has created an educational methodology designed to encourage law students to think about the cases that they are reading and then present and analyze the cases "on their feet." In using appellate case review, the methodology teaches important and necessary attorney skills to the detriment of other equally important skills. The reliance on traditional casebook methodology also fails to recognize and utilize different individual student learning intelligences as outlined in Howard Gardner's book, Intelligence Reframed (Basic Books 1999). Therein Gardner describes nine intelligences that educators must recognize and address when teaching students. According to Gardner these intelligences are (1) verbal-linguistic, (2) mathematical-logical, (3) musical, (4) visual/spatial, (5) bodily-kinesthetic, (6) interpersonal, (7) intrapersonal, (8) naturalist, and (9) existential. While he recognizes that it may be difficult to address all of these intelligences in any given course program, he suggests that a complete educational experience should include as many of the different learning intelligences as possible. The casebook/Socratic method fails to utilize several of these student learning intelligences.
Many law schools have recognized this failure of casebook/Socratic methodology. These law schools have tried to blend casebook theory with practice experiences. They have used "simulation" (trials and negotiations) and clinical programs to give their students real-world experiences. They have also used and relied on externships, apprenticeships, and clerkships with law firms, corporations, and the judiciary. The inherent problem with all of these "practice" experiences is that they are not universally available to all students. This voluntary/elective method of blending theory and practice has left many law graduates not ready to practice law.
A broader solution would be an integration of traditional scholarship and a blending of practice methodologies throughout the law school curriculum. This integrated team approach would utilize technology to foster practice-ready collaboration that recognizes different learning styles and demonstrates many varied "practice" tools and resources.
Technology enables today's creative legal educators. Legal educators now have the technological tools and the ability to create an interaction and collaboration between themselves, their students, and alumni. Through course-specific use of collaborative tools such as blogs, wikis, discussion, and Facebook groups, the educator and students can work together to further discuss, explore, and investigate coursework outside of the classroom in a real-world, real-time environment. Furthermore, this collaboration need not be moderated by the legal educator, but can enlist the services of upper-class law student instructors/research assistants or alumni.
These technologies also allow the law school's library to seamlessly integrate research resources and tools into individual class coursework collaboration. This library resource coursework integration does not require invasion into educator classroom time but expands law student research learning beyond traditional case and statute finding tools. As a member of the collaboration team, the law school library introduces legal research tools that recognize attorney research roles beyond litigation and traditional memo writing. It recognizes that attorneys wear many hats. They must be skilled interviewers, investigators, negotiators, and document creators. All these skills benefit from a diverse use of library practice resources. Practice resources and tools enable a new attorney to "work like a lawyer." Tools such as secondary resources limit the need for legal practitioners to "reinvent the wheel" and allow them to build on the expertise of others. Secondary resources such as legal encyclopedia, treatises, journals, newsletters, form books, and checklists are tools that serve as bibliographic mentors to students and newly practicing attorneys. Legal research tools that complement the familiar annotations, digests, and citators are tools that, through a collaborative team approach, build on the law student's classroom experience to prepare practice-ready attorneys.
This is a vision of a legal education collaborative team that integrates faculty, students, alumni, and library staff through the use of technology to create self-sufficient, flexible attorneys. These attorneys are prepared to change specialties as their world requires. They have a network of peers and friends ready and willing to collaborate on new issues as they develop. These attorneys will maintain a lifelong connection with their educational institution and a lifelong love of learning. This legal education collaboration will occur, with or without formal law school blessing or intervention. This collaborative technology does exist. The question is who will drive it? Will it be driven by law school leadership, or by students and their employers? No matter, it will be an apocalypse in knowledge—an apocalypse kNOW!
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